26 January is not a day to celebrate.
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Thanks to the tireless advocacy of the Day family, public intoxication has been decriminalised in Victoria. People who are identified as intoxicated in public will be supported to go to a safe place, like a sobering up centre, instead of being locked in a police cell under criminal or civil police powers.
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The Human Rights Law Centre supports all elements of the Uluru Statement from the Heart – the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution, Treaty and Truth-telling.
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First Nations people must work until they're 67 before getting the pension, just like white people. But we have a much lower life expectancy.
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Victoria has some of Australia’s most dangerous and discriminatory bail laws that are disproportionately impacting Aboriginal women and women experiencing disadvantage. The Human Rights Law Centre is advocating with partners for the Victorian Government to implement reforms to make Victoria’s bail laws fair.
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The Human Rights Law Centre is advocating to change regressive bail laws across the country that are driving up the number of unsentenced people in prison. These dangerous laws are not making the community safer, instead, they are increasing the overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in prisons and targeting women experiencing disadvantage.
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The Human Rights Law Centre is supporting the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) in their intervention in the coronial inquest into the police-shooting death of Warlpiri and Luritja teenager Kumanjayi Walker. The Human Rights Law Centre is assisting NAAJA to highlight systemic injustices experienced by Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, including systemic racism in policing.
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Children do not belong behind bars. Yet across Australia, children as young as 10 can be charged by police and locked up in prison. Due to systemic injustice, this is disproportionately impacting Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander children. The Human Rights Law Centre is a founding member of the #RaisetheAge campaign which seeks to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to at least 14 years old Australia wide.
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The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, the Human Rights Law Centre and proud Wakka Wakka man Dennis brought a legal challenge in the Federal Court. The case called for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be able to access the age pension earlier, to account for the gap in life expectancy.
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For years – to justify spending billions of dollars on prison expansion – governments across Australia have parroted the line that prisons support “community safety”. This premise is false.
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Whilst the special treatment experienced by the British and their descendants ensured their prosperity, the special treatment our people experienced entrenched our disadvantage, economic and social exclusion, poor health outcomes and shorter life expectancy.
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Prisons are Covid-19 tinderboxes and now we have seen case numbers connected to prisons across NSW explode. You couldn’t get a more dangerous breeding ground for the virus - indoors, poor ventilation, lack of sanitation, overcrowded with little ability to physically distance.
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Achieving human rights progress can be hard. It can take years and sometimes decades of advocacy, campaigning, strategy, suffering and sacrifice. Sometimes all that effort comes to nothing. Sometimes things go backwards despite our best efforts. Sometimes change happens, but the pace is far too slow.
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The Human Rights Law Centre continued to support the work of the family of Yorta Yorta woman Aunty Tanya Day, who died in police custody in Victoria in 2017. Aunty Tanya was arrested for being drunk in a public place after falling asleep on a train and died after hitting her head in a police cell. The Coroner found that the checks conducted on Aunty Tanya while she was in the police cell were inadequate and that police had failed to take proper care for her health and welfare.
Read MoreIt’s easy for many of us living in a country like Australia to take our human rights for granted. For most of us, most of the time, Australia is a great place to live.
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Social security is a vital safety net that most people in Australia will turn to at some point in their lives. In this context, the 2019 federal election offered two very different futures for remote communities in the Northern Territory.
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We need to rethink a system that is funnelling people into harmful prisons as the default response, writes Shahleena Musk.
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Across Australia the age of criminal responsibility is set at 10 years. The age of criminal responsibility is the age a child is considered capable of understanding they have done something wrong and can be dealt with in the criminal justice system. All Australian Governments should raise the age of criminal responsibility because it is the right thing to do, because it is evidence-based, and because the recommendations of the NT Royal Commission present a rare opportunity to embrace this change.
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Australian Governments must prohibit the solitary confinement of children in detention and closely regulate practices that can result in the forced isolation or segregation of a child. So what is solitary confinement?
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